Development of a Special Inertial Measurement Unit for UAV Applications

Abstract

Dynamics modeling is becoming more and more important in the development and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). An accurate model of a vehicle requires good knowledge of the dynamics properties and motion states, which are usually estimated with the help of integrated inertial measurement units (IMUs). This work develops a special six degrees of freedom IMU, which has the capability of measuring the angular accelerations. This paper introduces the design of the new IMU along with its sensor models and calibration procedures. The work introduces two experimental methods to verify the calibrated IMU readings. The IMU was designed to support an on-line methodology to estimate the parameters of UAV’s dynamics model that is currently being developed by the authors.